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New Phone, Who Dis?

New Phone, Who Dis?

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 EDITOR’S NOTE: Enter The Summer Slowdown Giveaway to win a free Smartphone. (Retail value: $250) Also get up to $750 in cash prizes. Enter to win right now.Chapter 12: New Phone, Who Dis?Dear Permission to be Powerful Reader,A brown paper bag filled with weed sits beside you. Brown rolling papers are scattered all over the floor. Scissors. You’ve become incredibly talented at rolling joints. That’s what happens when you’re smoking weed five times a day.You spark your lighter with a freshly rolled joint and puff. And then, you think…About the night when you moved to this new apartment.Without telling anyone.Without letting anyone know where you lived.You’re no longer answering their calls.Your grandmother texted you, saying, “You will regret this.”You deleted the text and blocked everybody.New phone, who dis?Life has become much quieter and more serene. Yet, you’re more depressed than ever. Around that time, you watch a horrible movie called Christine. It’s dull and sad, and she blows her brains out on live television at the end. You feel bothered by that movie for months. It’s terrible, tragic, depressing—and yet so relatable.You know you need to pull yourself out of this mess, or it might not end well. So, you start meditating. You fall in love with a spiritual teacher: Anthony “Moo” Young, also known as Mooji.Mooji is this Jamaican spiritual teacher. It’s like Bob Marley and the Buddha had a baby. The fact that you get wisdom packaged in a hilarious Jamaican grandpa’s jokes kills you. You guess you’ve found a cult you like. You’re so fake, but you don’t care.Mooji is giving you glimpses of beauty and serenity in the darkness. He brightens your day like an enchanting perfume. He’s awakened a new faith and hope about the bigger picture. You’re sure there’s more to this world than meets the eye.“He’s a fraud,” Erika says.Now, your headphones are always on when you follow his guided meditations.First of all, being Jamaican, he’s hilarious. And he’s profoundly eloquent. The poet Rumi was known for his ability to teach profound spiritual lessons with epic poems that could have won the Nobel Prize in literature if he were alive today. They were that good. And they sounded even better in his native Persian. And, well, you think Mooji has a similar quality.Mooji has some insight that other people don’t. His good vibes are contagious. You are not your mind. Your mind is far more clever, and it makes you unhappy. You are that which is beyond the mind. There are layers to this. And the mind corrupts perception. Awareness comes before the mind. And there’s something that comes before even that. This is where bliss resides.Suppose the mind is fighting to go unnoticed to continue running the show. Mooji has the right wit and charm to catch the mind off guard and help you see that you are not your mind. You are not the story of your life. You’ve had glimpses of the transcendent peace you experienced years before, but nothing like that first time. It’s enough to believe you should keep going.You’re not here to convince anyone. All you can say is the man touched your soul and continues to do so. True peace is accessible in this very world.Being so isolated has its benefits. You start drawing and painting more. You’re very good at it, and your art from this time is some of the best you’ve done in a long while.You read SO MANY BOOKS. The books you read during this phase set the tone for the rest of your life.You can see the difference between Erika’s output and yours. You’re determined to close that gap. At one point, you try to learn speed reading. Eventually, you figure out that you have dyslexia.And all the haters always ask: “Were you diagnosed? How do you know?” It’s as if you’re challenging Einstein’s theory of relativity or something—arrogant b******s. Well… you know that 50% of people with ADHD have dyslexia from other books you’ve read.Looking back, there were many years when you complained to your mother about your inability to keep up with your reading at school. They made you sit another test to get into your boarding school, which changed your life.Once your parents made you understand that you had a shot at leaving St. Lucia—not someday, but in just one year—you were on. You read morning, noon, and night. You didn’t care. You’d wake up at 5 a.m. Reading books you’d never have touched in St. Lucia.Like Ernest Hemingway. Maya Angelou. Mary Shelley. Instead of reading one or two books per year, you start reading one or two weekly. It was slow. It was painful. But you did it. Today, when you work or write, everything goes through a text-to-speech reader.You’ve learned a compensatory skill that turned a weakness into a superpower. Now, you can read faster, with far less mental energy, and understand the material better.This second-person perspective keeps the narrative’s original structure and depth while ...
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